---
title: Ratelimits
description: "Identities can be used to share ratelimits across multiple keys"
---

<Tip>
 Identities are in in public beta, please report any issues you encounter: [support](mailto:support@unkey.dev).
</Tip>

## Sharing ratelimits

Identities allow you to share ratelimits across multiple keys. Let's say you want to limit a specific user to 100 requests per second:
If you just set each key to `100 RPS` then the user can make `100 * number of keys` requests per second, which probably isn't what you want. Of course you could limit the number of keys a user can have or do some math to divide 100 by the number of keys they have, but that's not fixing the actual problem, it's just a workaround.

Instead, you should create an identity for the user, set the ratelimit on the identity to `100 RPS` and then associate all keys of the user with the identity. This way, the user can only make `100 RPS` across all of their keys.


## Multiple ratelimits

You can set multiple ratelimits for an identity and check against some or all of them when verifying a key.
Let's say you are building an app that uses AI under the hood and you want to limit your customers to 500 requests per hour, but also ensure that they don't blow up your bill by using too many tokens.

In this case you would create an identity for the user and then create two ratelimits:
1. `{name: "requests", limit: 500, duration: 3600000}` -> 500 requests per hour
2. `{name: "tokens", limit: 20000, duration: 86400000}` -> 20k tokens per day

Now if either one of those limits is exceeded, the request is denied.

<Info>
  API reference for verifying: [/api-reference/v2/keys/verify-api-key](/api-reference/v2/keys/verify-api-key)

  API reference for creating identities: [/api-reference/v2/identities/create-identity](/api-reference/v2/identities/create-identity)

</Info>
